Gustav Mahler may be as unfamiliar to one chunk of the population as
Blue Oyster Cult is to another, but practically everybody knows what
beer weekends-were-made-for and which hamburger hawkers will
do-it-all-for-you. In an age of increasingly fractionated audiences for
radio and records, and of a dozen or so subdivisions just within rock,
jingles selling products may be America's only truly popular,
all-embracing music.

They are also a short, sharp insight into the temper of the times, a
compressed cultural iconography. It was plain that the sexual...